Sunday, April 29, 2007

Before we start off, reports are coming in from across the nation — my new book, Sit Down & Shut Up! is available in the shops. Some people who ordered it on-line already have their copies. So what are you waiting for? Go out and get yours today!

I spent some time this afternoon at the UCLA Book Fair signing copies. But my first official book signing is scheduled for May 17th at the Bodhi Tree Book Store in West Hollywood. On Saturday June 2nd I'll be at the Phoenix Zen Center with a couple other locations in Phoenix on the following 2 days. Then it's up to San Francisco the week after that. I'll post a full schedule soon.

Today's offering is a kind of "bonus track" to my latest piece for Suicide Girls (see the link to your left). In there I mentioned some crates of records I found while cleaning out my dad's closets. I also found a bunch of my old comics that my parents had saved. When I started college I was an art student. My ambition at the time was to be a professional cartoonist. But I wasn't quite ambitious enough. My teachers never really got anything I did. It was far too low-brow for them to comprehend. I mean, my lord, The Three Stooges?!?!?!

This here was the first piece of Buddhist inspired writing I ever did. Click on the picture to enlarge it to readable size. The Rinzai Stooges was the first and the second was Bedlam in Nirvana, which I'm saving for next week's Suicide Girls page. The date on that one is December 1984, so this one must be a month or so earlier. Tim McCarthy, my Zen teacher at the time, loved this and encouraged me to do more. But I only ever did those two.

The katakana in the final frame is completely wrong, by the way. All I knew of Japanese came from a book I got out of the library. It's supposed to say "Curly Roshi."

I got mine from Amazon yesterday. This may sound silly but you answered a question I've had for a long time about the half lotus. My right foot goes on my left thigh so much better than vice versa. I really get the whole local hardcore thing too. I remember seeing bands in Pittsburgh like Half Life, Direct Action, Battered Citizens and how important the local scenes were then. It's funny you open up talking about Ian McKaye. I also always wondered if he would consider Soto Zen "Filler".It's in your headIt's in your headIt's in your headFILLER!You call it buddhadharmayou're full of shit!

By the way, Brad, it's a great bookI put it beside Uchiyama's commentaries on Bendowa, which is my favorite zen book ever.

Hey Brad, I am a big fan of your first book Hardcore ZEN and look forward to reading your latest edition. I was curious if you had any talks schedualed for the east coast. I go to College in Vermont and really dont have the time or money to fly all the way to California but I would love to beable to sit in on one of your classes.

"Before we start off, reports are coming in from across the nation — my new book, Sit Down & Shut Up! is available in the shops. Some people who ordered it on-line already have their copies. So what are you waiting for? Go out and get yours today!

I spent some time this afternoon at the UCLA Book Fair signing copies. But my first official book signing is scheduled for May 17th at the Bodhi Tree Book Store in West Hollywood. On Saturday June 2nd I'll be at the Phoenix Zen Center with a couple other locations in Phoenix on the following 2 days. Then it's up to San Francisco the week after that. I'll post a full schedule soon."

Well there's money to be made in that there zen stuff! Puts you up there with that Dalai lama guy.

There's very little money to be made in writing books. It's a lot like music: there are a few superstars and everyone else just gets chump change. Considering the amount of time that goes into writing, you're lucky if you make the minimum wage. If you're writing, it's for other reasons than to get rich.

I'm taking my time reading SD&SU. I just finished the chapter Zazen by Alone. So far, the book is thouroughy entertaining, very insightful, and completely fucking awesome. It will definitely come in handy once I begin reading the four volumes of Master Dogen's Shobogenzo I bought a month or two ago.

"There's very little money to be made in writing books. It's a lot like music: there are a few superstars and everyone else just gets chump change."

And books on buddhism have got to be the lowest of the low as far as sales figures go. I wonder how many copies of HZ were sold? That kind of info is hard to find. I wonder why there isn't a BILLBOARD like list available for book sales. Do fiction books sell better than non-fiction? Is Brad big among non-fiction authors? Does Brad sell more books than martha stewart? She sold 35,000 copies of "The Martha Rules". That seems like a lot..

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